Are you not old enough to remember WoW and Diablo 2's launch? Almost idenitical. Blizz never gets their servers ready properly.Odinyte

This is what happens when a game requires an Internet connection to play, even in single player mode where you're not playing online. Blizzard really has dropped the ball here; they could have learned a lesson from THQ on how they implemented Company of Heroes: if the Internet went down, you didn't get booted from your single player games.

Ok, I might be one of the few people that likes this concept of obtaining real money for items in game. It really is the only plausible way to elminate the item and gold farming sites. What I don't like about it is how big a cut blizz is taking from it. Not only is it a 1 dollar surcharge just to post an item, but if you want to then take your earnings and put them into a Paypal account Blizz will take an additional 15 percent! Just how is the consumer ever going to make money on a system like this lets say your epic sword sells for a whopping $100 dollars. (unimaginable that people would pay that much for a video game item) This would mean that blizz would get 15 of those dollars just for giving you the privledge of selling the item. 85 dollars profit sounds like a great deal, but the reality is that I have a hard time beleiving that most items will even sell for 20 dollars. It essentially means that nothing on the real money AH will be on there for less than 5 dollars. All im saying is think how much money blizz will get from the surcharges alone they really dont need to take a big cut at the end. If this idea takes off I would wager that they would be making almost as much money off this VIRTUAL auction house as they do off of WOW subscriptions.

bryjoered2007

First of all, you ask how is the consumer going to make money on a system like this? Let me put it this way: if anyone out there is looking to supplement their income by selling Diablo 3 items online, please do not quit your day job.

Secondly, you have it slightly confused. If you sell the sword for $100, Blizzard takes $1 dollar. The other $99 is deposited into your Battle.net account. If youu then choose to "cash out" via PayPal, they will deduct 15% of the balance ($99). If you choose to keep it in your Battle.net account, you have $99 worth of "credits" to use however you want. Blizzard is not automatically taking 15% off the top regardless. You need to actually read what the rules say.

You have a very naive sense of how economics work. The truth of the matter is, at the beginning most ignorant and naive gamers will try to sell their weapons and whatnot for real money, only to find no takers. Eventually, the cash auction house will implode upon itself because of the intrinsic value of the items related to their occurances in the game: the cash auction house will ultimately be used for only extremely rare items, while the gold auction house will take over more than likely.

I am not a fan of the 15% fee on cashing out via PayPal, and I'm extremely unhappy with the 15% fee on gold auction house transactions. C'mon Blizzard, it isn't like there is a finite supply of GOLD in the game. What do you need with 15% of a gold transaction?